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Monthly Archives: May 2003

It’s appropriate that I’m in a coding frenzy for the next few weeks. WWDC e-ticket in hand, and at work we go GM on a major version of our software just a week before the conference.

This will be my fifth WWDC, and I think it will be a good one. It’s great to work for a company committed to this conference. Lots of mysterious TBA sessions, which probably means they will cover new Panther technology. Unfortunately the session map puts some of the good Carbon sessions on the last day. Every WWDC I have to wonder if Apple will fully support Carbon development.

The code I’m working on now will be the last for Mac OS 9. Since I use a custom C++ framework, we’ve been expanding it over the last few months. Wrappers for Carbon Timers, network transfer, and QuickTime. OS X-specific stuff, like sheets. More advanced UI controls, custom buttons, and a search box. A minimal toolbar class, which looks like the OS X toolbar at first glance, but works on OS 9 and doesn’t support customization.

When we finally say goodbye to OS 9, some of this code can be replaced. WWDC is a good turning point. Without worrying about shipping a product, I can dive into the new Carbon HIToolbox APIs. And Cocoa. Based on what Apple says at the conference I will decide whether moving to a hybrid Carbon/Cocoa app is the way to go.

The Matrix double-feature last night was fun (thanks Damon). Five hours of movies and food, yikes. I enjoyed the movie, and my only complaint was when they started replacing Keanu with a CG character in some of the fight scenes. It started to look more like a video game then a film, but given the nature of the Matrix world, maybe that was the point.

Before and between the features they screened 3 of the new Animatrix shorts. I had seen part of one online, but was waiting until the DVD came out so I could watch them all. Now I’m not so sure. I’ll probably still get the DVD, but I hope the subject matter in the other shorts is better than The Second Renaissance. Not that it was bad — it was brilliantly done, with a great blend of CG and hand-drawn — but it sure was a depressing little film. Sort of like Grave of the Fireflies: a beautiful and moving film, but not something I want to watch over and over.

At SXSW I told Mena Trott that RSS 1.0 was dead or dying, because it was too complicated. Turns out I was partially wrong — it’s very much alive, but perhaps only because it’s the default in Movable Type. Six Apart has signed up for the semantic web vision, and they are tool builders so they look for ways to make their products spit out semantic goodness.

I used to feel the same way. I wanted to build tools to help web designers use meta data effectively, provide meaningful structure to their site, put their template-driven pages in a database, and a whole host of other tricks that in 1995 seemed like noble work. I’m too tired for that now. I just want to use the web, and build good software, and do a few other things.

You reach a point where you no longer want to tinker with things that work. Could RSS 2.0 be better? Sure, but so could any number of standards. You need stability to build new tools on top of.

Ben Trott chimes in with “RSS for Weblogs”. I still think there’s a division in the RSS community between people that want a simple format and people that want to evolve it, embracing RDF and a handful of upcoming weblog-related specs. As such, the battle for RSS standards is going to suck. Of course maybe I’m wrong, maybe this work does need to happen, to “finish” RSS. To all involved, good luck!

“Zeldman maintains this feed by hand, like he maintains the rest of his site. Let’s keep this in mind the next time someone claims that it’s OK for a data format to be complex because it’ll only ever be produced and consumed by machines.”

In the TypePad announcements comes word that they will be pushing FOAF (friend of a friend). According to the Guardian article, “instantly taking an experimental standard and taking it to the mainstream.” Is that a good thing?

Let’s not forget the little guy who has to code this stuff by hand. And don’t push formats that no one wants. Where possible, give choices. When a product takes off like Movable Type has, the formats that it spits out have a big influence.

I’ll end with a few RDF articles. Hopefully this will be my last blog post about blogs for a while.

“But we’d hate to be saddled with the rigorous data preparation that the Safari production teams slog through. That’s the Semantic Web dilemma in a nutshell. Where’s the sweet spot? How can we marry spontaneity and structure? Recent trends in blogspace, plus emerging XML-savvy databases suggest a way forward.”